Read the book before you have an opinion about it.

Millions of people have shaped their whole lives around one of these books, and most of us have an opinion about them without ever having opened one. This is the place to open one.

The one rule: every tradition here is presented the way its own people present it, at full strength, in a real translation with the reference on every line. No critics, no rankings, no verdicts. You read it, and the opinion you form is your own.

Almost every shelf below is a book. Tap it for what it is, which free translation to read and why, how long it takes, how its own people read it, and the same ten questions every book is asked, answered in plain words the way its own believers would answer, with the book’s own passage under each where it has one: how the world began, who made it, what a person is, what has gone wrong, what we are here for, before and after, the key figures, the moral code, what a good life looks like. Then how many belong, how you would join, and the great rites of a life. One shelf has no books on it at all — traditions that never wrote their teaching down, where what stands in place of a book is a person: an initiated priest, a trained reciter, a carved house, a belt of shell, a song that is also a map. They get the same questions, and one more: how is it held? For today gives you eight different takes every morning, each from a different tradition: a passage, how one of them answers one of the ten questions, how their book actually reached us and when it was dug up, a word of theirs that English has no equivalent for, something about them that is not what you would think, two traditions on the same question side by side, one of the rites that marks a life, and the book itself.